BlackBerry And NantHealth Team Up For Healthcare-Specific Smartphone

We’ve heard of smartphones designed for security purposes, but what about smartphones designed for professionals in the healthcare industry? Is there even such a thing? Wouldn’t such a device be more focused on apps instead? Well according to the reports, it seems that jumping into healthcare could be one of the avenues that BlackBerry is exploring.

According to reports, BlackBerry has recently invested into NantHealth, and together with the company, they are expected to create a smartphone that specifically targets professionals working in the health industry. In a way it’s sort of like how BlackBerry appealed to enterprise and government users back when they were at the top of their game.

This was confirmed by BlackBerry when N4BB reached out to them to ask them to comment on the matter. “This investment and planned collaboration aligns with the reliability, security, and versatility of BlackBerry’s end-to-end solutions – from the embedded QNX operating system powering complex medical devices to secure cloud-based networks to instantaneous information sharing over BBM Protected and will include a device as well.”

The device is also said to be specialized in viewing 3D images as well as CT scans, although we’re not sure how that will be accomplished or how different it would be from a normal smartphone. Apart from that, the functions of the phone is expected to be more or less in line with a regular smartphone and will be able to download apps, play games, access to media, and so on. It has also been pegged for a release either towards the end of 2014 or early 2015. What do you guys think?